XML and J2EE: Commodity Skills

Jan 10, 2007

In My Job Went to India,
I talked about using supply and demand as a gauge with which to make
decisions about which technologies you should invest in as a software
developer:

The offshore market has injected its low-cost programmers into a
relatively narrow set of technologies. Java and .NET programmers are a
dime a dozen in India. India has a lot of Oracle DBAs as well. Less
mainstream technologies are very much underrepresented by the offshore
development shops. When choosing a technology set to focus your career
on, you should understand the effects of increased supply and lower
prices on your career prospects.

As a .NET programmer, you may find yourself competing with tens of
thousands of more people in the job market than you would if you were,
for example, a Python programmer. This would result in the average
cost of a .NET programmer decreasing significantly, possibly driving
demand higher (i.e., creating more .NET jobs). So, you’d be likely to
find jobs available, but the jobs wouldn’t pay all that well. The
supply of Python programmers might be much smaller than that of .NET
programmers with a demand to match.

If the Python job market were to support noticeably higher prices
per-programmer, additional people might be attracted to supply their
services at this higher price range, resulting in competition that
would drive the price back down.

The whole thing is a balancing act. But, one thing seems certain (for
now). India caters to the already balanced IT services markets. You
don’t find mainstream Indian offshoring companies jumping on
unconventional technologies. They aren’t first-movers. They generally
don’t take chances. They wait for technology services markets to
balance, and they disrupt those markets with significantly lower
per-programmer costs.

OCaml (I
especially enjoyed both Urbana and Champaign being high on this
list)

As David says, it’s totally unscientific. But if I were a young
programmer trying to figure out where to invest my time, I might spend
just a little of it on Google Trends researching who I’m likely to be
competing with.